What limits our response?

Note to readers: this is the latest distribution piece for Eltham traditionalists. It is therefore in the format of a brief explanatory overview of traditionalist politics.


Liberalism is the ruling ideology of our age. It is the dominant political belief which is radically transforming our society. As Professor John Schwarzmantel puts it:

Contemporary liberal-democracy is an ideological society, where a particular version of liberalism prevails

There is a destructive side to liberalism. The key liberal belief is that we are made human through autonomy: through our ability to self-determine or to self-define. Professor John Kekes writes:

the true core of liberalism, the inner citadel for whose protection all the liberal battles are waged [is] autonomy

How are people made autonomous? They must be “liberated” from whatever is predetermined rather than self-determined. This includes their sex (being masculine or feminine), their ethny (inherited forms of communal identity), traditional forms of family life (since these are given to us rather than self-defined), and objective forms of morality (since under the logic of liberalism the good must also be self-defined).

What liberalism replaces these with is a vision of a society made up of blank slate, atomised individuals, in pursuit of their own subjective, self-generated good.

This is destructive because it means having to make things which matter a great deal not matter. Most people, for instance, do identify in important ways with a distinct, inherited national tradition; they do not look forward to its replacement by a more radically individualistic existence within an international system.

Similarly, most people identify positively with being a man or a woman and do not wish to suppress this identity within an androgynous society which is hostile to sex distinctions.

The effects of liberalism are felt by many people to be symptoms of social breakdown or decline. But this then raises the question of how liberalism has been able to maintain its dominance. How has liberalism been able to limit effective opposition to its grip on Western societies?

Second tier arguments

One part of the answer is that liberalism has been able to limit political debate to second tier arguments. The underlying assumptions of liberalism are rarely brought to the surface and argued about. Instead, debate is limited to a secondary question, namely how do you best regulate a liberal society made up of millions of atomised, individual wills?

How you answer this question determines where you are placed on the political spectrum. Those on the right tend to believe that society is best regulated by the free market. It is typical for right-liberals to believe that individuals can compete in the market for their own profit and that the hidden hand of the market will regulate the outcome for the overall prosperity and progress of society.

Right-liberals therefore tend to focus on Economic Man: man in his role as a rational economic agent. Originally, right-liberals tended to be anti-statist, as they saw state intervention as distorting the mechanism of the market. These days it is the more radical right-liberals, the libertarians, who maintain this anti-statist position.

Those on the left are more skeptical that a liberal society can be regulated by the market. They see the market as generating inequalities, which then makes it harder for some to pursue a self-defining lifestyle. They think it more egalitarian and more rational for society to be regulated by the neutral expertise of a state bureaucracy. The focus of the left is not so much on Economic Man but on Social Man.

The further left you go on the political spectrum, the more anti-capitalist you become (so that Marxism is correctly thought of as being far left).

The case of the UK

Let’s take the UK as an example. A newspaper columnist like Theo Hobson is not shy when it comes to declaring his support for the state ideology:

All we seek is a reassertion of liberalism as the nation's common ideology.

He can assert this confidently because both major parties in the UK are committed to liberalism. The so-called Conservative Party, for instance, is currently led by David Cameron. He looks on his party as a “champion of liberal values”:

today we have a Conservative Party … which wants Britain to be a positive participant in the EU, as a champion of liberal values.

So the Conservatives are liberals. More specifically they are right-liberals, as they prefer to have society regulated by a free market rather than by a centralised state. That’s why Cameron has declared that his party “supports open markets,” is “committed to decentralisation and localism”; and aims to strengthen “our economy by freeing the creators of wealth, especially small businesses, to create the jobs and prosperity we need.”

And what of the left? Beatrice Webb defined the project of the left back in 1928. Rather than relying on the market to regulate society, the left was motivated by,

our common faith in a deliberately organised society – our belief in the application of science to human relations … the common people, served by an elite of unassuming experts

This is the technocratic solution to regulating liberal society. Ed Miliband is the current leader of the Labour Party in the UK. In setting out his political agenda he warned,

Our society is at risk of being reshaped in ways that will devastate the proud legacy of liberalism. We see a free market philosophy being applied to our schools …

Miliband is defining his politics exactly as you would expect a left-liberal to do: he commits himself to liberalism, but is not so keen on free market solutions.

Those who support the two main parties can be passionate in their allegiances. That can make it seem as if we have more choice than we really do. We really only get a choice as to how best to regulate liberalism, not whether we want to continue to run society along liberal lines. And yet it is the liberalism itself that is doing the damage.

We need to open up politics, so that the important first tier issues are more widely understood and discussed.

What makes Malcolm Fraser sad?

I wrote an article earlier this month about political distinctions within the Liberal Party (overseas readers might not know, but this is the more right-wing of the two major parties here).

I noted that one of the main distinctions is between purists (those who want the party to represent liberalism alone and who are opposed to conservatism) and fusionists (those who, wrongly in my opinion, believe that the party can harmonise liberalism and conservatism).

I identified the former prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, as one of the purists. And in today's Herald Sun he confirmed my choice. He explained his recent decision to quit the Liberal Party this way:

the Liberal Party has become increasingly conservative ... It's something also that I'm very sad about. If it's possible for any good to come out of a resignation ... I would like it to be that Liberals ... must fight harder to fight for Liberal values within the party itself.

If they don't, more conservative elements of the party will become stronger and stronger and more pervasive and the basic Liberal philosophy on which the party was founded by Menzies will be cast further and further into the ash heap.

Clearly Fraser is a liberal purist: he is someone who sees conservatism as the enemy of the Liberal Party tradition and who is saddened by the presence of conservatism within the party.

Which says something about the politics of Australia in the 1970s when Fraser won office. In that decade, Fraser was thought to be on the conservative end of the political spectrum. P.G. Tiver wrote a book on the Australian Liberal Party in 1978 and this is how he describes Fraser:

Fraser's own ideology is, along the liberal-conservative continuum, conservative on all major points, and more strikingly conservative than Menzies'.

And this is from a report on a Liberal Party meeting in 1974:

There were some fears at the start of the meeting that the philosophical differences between "trendies" such as Peacock and Chipp and conservatives such as Fraser and Forbes might create a problem ...

The fact that an anti-conservative like Fraser could be considered a conservative "on all major points" shows just how limited Australian politics was in the 1970s. The most "conservative" political figure was someone who was utterly unsympathetic to conservatism.

Little wonder then that liberalism marched on with little opposition in Australia throughout that period.

Liberalism has been around for so long, that little about it is novel. For instance, liberals want to maximise individual autonomy. But this leads to an ideological tension. Some liberals believe that the best way to maximise individual autonomy is through a laissez-faire principle in which there is minimal government interference. But other liberals think that people can't be autonomous unless they have the resources to put their preferred choices into effect and that the state should therefore intervene to create equality whether of opportunity or outcome.

In the 1970s in Australia, the first option was labelled as conservative and the second as socialist or ameliorative. It's in this sense, and this limited sense alone, that Fraser was a conservative. In a strongly "socialist" political climate he held to the so-called "conservative" option. For instance in 1975 he declared that,

I have no intention of leading a Government which is only going to socialise Australia at a slower pace than Labor.

And in the same year he wrote:

there are serious limitations on the ability of the government to produce the better life

And this, in the political climate of the time, was enough to put him at the most "conservative" end of politics, when all he had really done was to prefer one liberal option over another.

Fraser has never been a genuine conservative. In a previous post I wrote of Fraser that,

Way back in 1968 Fraser gave a speech in which he noted that one Australian university, as an entrance requirement, "recognises the following languages - French, German, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Italian, Russian and Japanese". He criticised this selection by claiming that,

the list as a whole is one belonging to the last century except for one of the languages mentioned.

According to Fraser, the European languages did not belong in the twentieth century. Only the Japanese one did.

Fraser hasn't changed his politics. He's been pushing for open borders for decades. He's not only a liberal but a radical one. He feels no connection at all to any national heritage or inherited identity.

To be a genuine conservative, there has to be a tradition, or some aspect of a tradition, you think worth conserving. Fraser demonstrated a lack of attachment to the West itself back in 1968, a declaration of non-conservatism if ever there was one.

So this is our choice?

What is the way forward for the left? That's the theme of an article by Jonathan Derbyshire in the New Statesman.

According to Derbyshire the mainstream left in Britain is "intellectually hollowed out". He thinks it timely that a new pamphlet has been released titled What Next for Labour? Ideas for the Progressive Left.

One of the contributors to the pamphlet, Sunder Katwala, argues that the technocratic management of the market isn't enough. Instead, the left must focus on elaborating,

an autonomous moral conception, independent of, and ultimately sovereign over, the mere notions of efficiency and rational 'tidying up' of capitalist society into which socialism is in danger of degenerating.

Katwala is a Fabian socialist who wants to go back to basics. He wants more emphasis on the autonomous individual rather than on technocratic efficiency.

Then there is the suggestion made by Jon Cruddas, a Labour Party MP, and Jonathan Rutherfod, an academic:

New Labour, Cruddas and Rutherford imply, has worried too much about individual liberty and not enough about equality. The key 'fault line' in the coming debates on the left, they argue, will be between those who see the market as the best mechanism for delivering the autonomy so prized in modern societies, and those who think that genuine freedom is a collective achievement. Or, as Katwala puts it, between those for whom autonomy is the ultimate end (call them "liberals") and those whose principal concern is with how autonomy is distributed (call them "social democrats").

Read this carefully and you'll see just how limited a choice we're being offered here.

Katwala's "liberals" think that individual autonomy is the ultimate end. So do his "social democrats". The only difference between them is that the "liberals" (in the European not American sense) believe that autonomy is maximised by individuals pursuing their self-interest in a market; the "social democrats" are more focused on the equal distribution of autonomy through "collective" (by which they mean state) action.

This debate is generations old. It is politics with a walking stick. And it is radically reductive: we are supposed to assume that the ultimate end is one single good, namely individual autonomy - with politics divided between those who favour equality (in the distribution of autonomy) and those who favour liberty (fewer impediments to the practice of autonomy).

The task for traditionalists isn't to take sides in this debate. It's to move beyond its limitations.

What we should be discussing is whether autonomy (or any other single good) can be taken as the sole organising principle of society; what we are logically committing ourselves to when autonomy becomes the highest end; what other goods must be sacrificed in the attempt to maximise autonomy; and whether the pursuit of autonomy has internal coherence.

An exchange on freedom

I recommend reading a post at View from the Right on What defines "left" and "right"?

A reader of the site wants to base his politics on individual liberty. He believes that the political goods favoured by conservatives will "emanate naturally" from the people if there is individual liberty and a small state.

Lawrence Auster replies that individual liberty was based on other, previously existing goods which need to be openly recognised and defended. Furthermore, the term freedom has taken on a distinct meaning, unhelpful to conservatives, in modern liberal societies.

The last point is an important one which I put this way in a post titled, In defence of what matters:

The effort to disentangle conservatism from right-liberalism also means exercising care when adopting "individual liberty" as a slogan.

Liberalism has been dominant for some time now, so when liberty is spoken of it is commonly understood in terms of liberal politics. This can mean that liberty is thought of, in right-liberal terms, as the freedom of an abstracted individual against the state or against any kind of collective. It can mean too that "liberty" is understood in more general liberal terms as a freedom from what matters: as a "liberation" from significant aspects of our own selves which aren't self-authored.

A conservative politics can't be based on liberty understood in these terms. If we are to be free, it must be as complete, non-abstracted men living as social beings within given communities.

Lawrence Auster puts the distinction between traditionalism and a liberal view of individual freedom succinctly as follows:

the key defining thing of traditionalism is the recognition of a natural, social, and spiritual order by which we are formed; we don't entirely create ourselves through our own will and choices, much of what we are, for example our sex, is not chosen by us, but comes from beyond us. Yet liberals today believe that people have the right to choose literally everything about themselves, even their sex.

Summarising Lawrence Auster's post like this is a bit disjointed, so I do encourage readers to follow the exchange at VFR.

Happiness

There is a new battleground between left and right liberals, namely, happiness. Their debate about what makes us happy reveals a great deal about the mindset of both the left and the right, so it’s well worth looking at.
 
I will take as a representative of the left, the Australian “think-tanker” Clive Hamilton, and on the right, another think-tanker, the Swede Johan Norberg.
 
The left: Clive Hamilton

Last year, Clive Hamilton published a discussion paper called The Disappointment of Liberalism. He began this paper by noting that liberalism had succeeded in its basic aim.

What is the basic aim of liberalism? Let me put it this way, as simply as I can. Liberals believe that we are made human by being self-created through our own individual will and reason. This means that for liberals it is important that the individual is “liberated” from anything which impedes individual choice.

What kinds of things limit individual choice? Most notably, those things which are important to our self-identity, but which we inherit or are born to (and therefore don’t get to choose). This includes our sex (whether we are man or woman), and our race and ethnicity.

For a liberal, it is important that these unchosen things be made not to matter. Therefore, someone who defends them, for instance, by accepting different social roles for men and women will be called “sexist” by a liberal. Similarly, a white European who defends his own ethnic tradition will be labelled a “racist” – because such a view conflicts with liberal first principles.

Hamilton, though, doesn’t do much name calling as he is confident that the liberal project has succeeded. Note how clearly he expresses the basic principles of liberalism in the following passage:

Now that the constraints of socially imposed roles have weakened, oppression based on gender, class and race is no longer tenable, and the daily struggle for survival has for most people disappeared, we have entered an era characterised by ‘individualisation’ where, for the first time, individuals have the opportunity to ‘write their own biographies’ rather than have the chapters foretold by the circumstances of their birth. For the first time in history, the ordinary individual in the West has the opportunity to make a true choice ...

We’ve never had more freedom to shape ourselves in the way we want ...

This liberal concept of “freedom”, though, creates a particular difficulty. It leaves you with a society made up of millions of atomised individuals, each acting according to their own individual wants. How then do you hold a society together?

This is exactly the issue Hamilton wishes to discuss. He writes,

this essay is a prelude to answering the question of how we can reconstruct the social in an individualized world. In a world where we are no longer bound together by our class, gender or race, why should we live cooperatively?

In the nineteenth century, liberals thought they had found an answer to the dilemma. If individuals sought to follow a profit motive, no matter how selfishly, the hidden hand of the market would regulate the outcome for the overall benefit of society: for growth and progress.

However, by the end of the nineteenth century, a group of “new liberals” were decisively rejecting the free market solution, because it generated inequalities of outcome. They preferred the idea of a “rational” regulation of society, particularly by the central state.

Today, the nineteenth century “classical liberals” are the right-wing of politics, and the twentieth century “new liberals” are the left-wing.

You would therefore expect a left-liberal like Clive Hamilton to be critical of free market solutions. And he is. In fact, his basic argument runs as follows.

First, as we have seen, he celebrates the overthrow of a traditionalist “social” conservatism. He believes that today,

the shackles of minority oppression and social conservatism have been cast off. The traditional standards, expectations and stereotypes that were the target of the various movements, dating from the 1960s – the sexual revolution, the counter-culture and the women’s movement – ushered in an era of personal liberty.

And yet, continues Hamilton, people don’t seem to be any happier. He notes “the extraordinary proliferation of the diseases of affluence” which,

suggests that the psychological wellbeing of citizens of rich countries is in decline. These diseases include drug dependence, obesity, loneliness and a suite of psychological disorders ranging from depression, anxiety, compulsive behaviours and widespread but ill-defined anomie. Perhaps the most telling evidence is the extraordinary prevalence of depression in rich countries.

What can explain the failure of the liberal project to create happiness? Hamilton’s answer is to blame the influence of the free market. He believes that people aren’t using their new found freedom to make reasoned, considered choices, but are being manipulated by the market to follow more shallow, consumeristic impulses.

It is Hamilton’s belief that “The market itself has, in recent decades, evolved into an instrument of coercion” and that “The activities of the marketers, given unbounded licence by the free-market policies of neoliberals [he means right-liberals], reinforce daily the promise of instant gratification ... So forceful and pervasive are the messages of the marketers that they now provide the raw material from which people construct their identities.”

The right liberal: Johan Norberg

Johan Norberg has also written a paper about happiness: The Scientist’s Pursuit of Happiness.

We know from this paper that Norberg is a liberal because he expresses in it the underlying liberal principle that individuals should choose their own identity, and reject inherited ones. He writes that,

a liberal and market-oriented society allows people freedom to choose. In the absence of authoritarian leaders ... forcing us to live the way they think is best for us, we can choose the kind of identity and lifestyle that suits us ... In traditional societies, on the other hand, the individual has to adapt to pre-fabricated roles and demands.

We can also tell from Norberg’s paper that he is not only a liberal, but more specifically a right-liberal. Unlike Hamilton, he is a devotee of the free market, and tends to see man’s economic activity as central to his life.

For instance, he writes that, “If you want to meet a happy Australian, ask someone who thinks that people like themselves have a good chance of improving their standard of living.”

He believes also that happiness reached a peak after WWII, because “With economies growing rapidly, people began to think that their children would enjoy a better life than they had.”

He is even willing to place economic activity ahead of family life, by citing a survey in which people recorded more happiness while working than when spending free time with their families.

Note too his idea that “Belief in the future grows when poor countries begin to experience growth, when markets open up, when incomes increase and people’s decisions begin to affect their place in society.”

Norberg, in fact, is such a devotee of the free market, that he wants no controls at all on the movement of labour. He believes in unfettered immigration, stating that “If people were allowed to cross borders at will, they would take their ideas and their labour and skills with them. This is all part of free trade...” (The Age, 24/9/05)

Of course, left-liberals also support open borders. However, whereas left-liberals typically support multiculturalism, Norberg follows the more usual right-liberal policy of wanting high immigration plus assimilation. In his view,

It is time for our liberal societies to stop apologising, to get back our self-confidence and state that tolerance and freedom is our way, and those who are out to destroy that deserve no toleration. The idea that we shouldn’t impose our values (on immigrants) is bizarre. Of course we should.

We should force everybody to accept every other human being as a free and autonomous individual with the same rights as himself. That is the law of a liberal, open society, and that is what has created the most creative and humane societies in world history. Everybody who wants to enjoy that society must conform to it. (The Age, 24/9/05)

Note that Norberg in this quote writes as a kind of upbeat booster to his own liberal society. This is, again, typical of right-liberals. Left-liberals are more inclined to see themselves as “outsiders” (even when they are very influential) and to be negative and critical of their own societies.

The fact that left-liberals often see themselves as “dissenters” is illustrated by a recent university study which found that 20% of candidates for the left-wing Australian Labor Party declared themselves to be either not very proud, or not at all proud, to be Australian.

Finally, as you would expect of a right-liberal, Norberg is anti-statist. He believes that the free market is the solution, and so doesn’t like the idea of state interference. It is no coincidence, therefore, that he believes that the state can’t create happiness.

It is his view that “it does not seem like the growth of the welfare state has increased human happiness” and that “A government that says it wants to make us happy misses the obvious fact that a government can’t give us happiness.”

A conservative reply

How might a traditionalist conservative respond to Hamilton and Norberg? I have already written a reply to Hamilton, so I will focus here on Norberg.

One thing a traditionalist can do is to reply to Norberg within the current framework of debate. For instance, Norberg claims that,

the most happy and satisfied places on earth are the ones that are most dynamic, individualist and wealthy: North America, Northern Europe and Australia.

If so, this doesn’t say much about the human capacity for happiness. As Hamilton has already pointed out, there is an epidemic of mental ill-health in North America, Northern Europe and Australia. Hamilton notes that the incidence of depression in the US grew tenfold in the five decades after WWII, despite this being a golden age of economic growth. He also cites reports that nearly one in four French people are taking tranquillisers, anti-depressants, antipsychotics or other mood-altering drugs.

Even more remarkably, in Norway, which has reputedly become “the richest country of all time”, one in four adults seeks psychiatric treatment each year.

What is also significant is the survey result, quoted by Norberg himself, showing that 48% of Americans had “downshifted” in the last five years, by reducing their working hours, declining promotions, lowering their material expectations or moving to a quieter place.

So the idea that careerism and rising material standards of living are sufficient to produce human happiness doesn’t seem to fit the facts. The free market doesn’t provide everything we need to be happy.

However, it’s not enough for traditionalists to respond at this level. We leave too much of the liberal mentality intact if we do.

First, we need to engage at the level of underlying principles. Norberg wants us to be free to choose as long as we don’t choose traditional, “pre-fabricated” roles and identities. This might not seem too much of an imposition, but we need to remember that many traditional identities became accepted and generally applied (pre-fabricated) because they reflected significant aspects of human nature.

Women being maternal and caring for their own children is a traditional role and identity; but it is no light imposition to declare this role to be illegitimate for being “prefabricated”.

In other words, it is those things we are most likely to want to choose which Norberg’s liberalism will frown upon and want to “liberate” us from.

Second, traditionalists need to question an even more basic assumption underlying the whole debate. Is it really true that the aim of human life is the pursuit of individual happiness?

In liberal societies, this assumption is widespread. One of the inalienable rights of man listed in the US Declaration of Independence is “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. A radical right-liberal, Ayn Rand, was even bold enough to assert that her philosophy was “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”

This assumption, that our life’s purpose is the pursuit of our own happiness, seems false to me and even a little degrading.

It’s not that happiness doesn’t form part of a good life, but that we are made to reach beyond this to more significant things.

It’s difficult to give a complete picture of what these significant things are, but I’ll make a start. I think, for instance, it’s important for individuals to experience certain forms of “connectedness”. This might include a love of nature, an appreciation of art, romantic or marital love, a sense of ancestry, an ethnic or national identity, and our own masculine or feminine natures and the virtues associated with these.

The importance of such forms of connectedness is not just that they make us “happy”, but that they anchor us, provide a significant moral framework, add meaning to our life efforts, and most importantly provide the deeper forms of self-identity: our enduring sense of who we are.

Liberalism doesn’t want us to be connected in the way I am trying to describe; the liberal aim is for the individual to be free-floating and self-scripting, always independent and autonomous, with multiple, fluid, negotiated identities (to use liberal jargon).

It may well be possible to find a kind of surface happiness in the liberal way, through the pursuit of a purely individual happiness (shopping, careers and so on), but much of the traditional significance of life will be left out.

At any rate, we should not fall into the trap of accepting the liberal terms of debate. If we feel uncomfortable with the idea that our life’s goal is the individual pursuit of happiness, our challenge is to step outside this view and to advance a clear alternative.

(First published at Conservative Central, 27/09/2005)

Let me off the Anglosphere!

I recently came across the writings of political futurist James Bennett. He is an advocate of a new political alignment, which he calls the Anglosphere.

I cannot support his project. I can never be a loyal member of an Anglosphere, and I wish to explain why.

Three states

In one of his articles, James Bennett spells out the three kinds of nation states that might survive into the future. In effect, these three states are right-liberal, left-liberal and traditionalist conservative.

Bennett describes the features of these different states very well. For instance, he accurately describes the right-liberal state as,

The classical-liberal civic state, which seeks to carry out most social functions through voluntary institutions of civil society rather than through the state, seeks to minimize the percentage of GDP devoted to remaining core functions, and in general seeks to maximize the prosperity of its citizens as individuals.

This very ably describes the ideal state of right-wing liberals. Right-liberals ideally want a free market economy and a small state. The state can be kept small because many of the functions of society are carried out by small voluntary associations instead of by a central state.

Bennett describes the left-liberal state as,

The social democratic civic state, which maintains a high tax rate relative to classical-liberal states, intervenes more frequently in its market economy, delivers more elaborate social benefits, and seeks to maximize the economic and social security of its citizens.

Again, this is an intelligent description of the ideal left-liberal state, in which there is a greater emphasis on deliberate intervention by a central welfare state, such as you find in the Scandinavian countries.

Finally, Bennett describes a more traditionalist conservative state as,

The nationalist-conservative or religious civic state, which generates a strong nationalist, religious or ideological narrative and places duty obligations on its citizens, yet maintains a relatively open market economy.

This is perhaps the least tidy description, but it does attempt to describe a state based on what he calls a "positive, self-affirming narrative ... provided by religious, national or ethnic identity."

Which one?

So I agree broadly with the alternatives set out by James Bennett. Which leaves the vital question: which one do we wish to follow?

Bennett gives us a clear answer: he wants the English speaking countries to go with the first, right-liberal option.

Bennett points out, correctly enough, that the English speaking countries have tended to adopt a right-wing form of liberalism, in contrast to the more left-liberal continental European countries.

He therefore wants the English speaking countries to form a kind of right-liberal alliance. This alliance would develop around trade agreements and defence treaties.
The group of English speaking nations would form a "network commonwealth" which Bennett has dubbed the Anglosphere.

Civil society

So what is wrong with a right-liberal Anglosphere? It's important to remember that right-liberals have a particular understanding of a civil society. In Bennett's own words,

A civil society is one that is built of a vast network of networks. These networks start with the individual and the families, community organizations, religious congregations, social organizations, and businesses created by individuals coming together voluntarily. Continuing up through the local, regional, national, and international networks, the tying together of local organizations creates civil societies, which in turn beget civil states.

At first sight, this might seem like a conservative view. Conservatives too believe that a central state should remain small so that the natural institutions of civil society can flourish.

But there's a key difference. Bennett insists that the institutions of civil society be strictly voluntary. It's no accident that he specifies a voluntary arrangement.

All liberals, whether of the left or right, believe that the individual must be created by his own will and reason. This means that the individual must rationally consent to membership of any social grouping. That's why liberals so much like the idea of individuals making a contract or covenant to form social groups. It's also why liberals contrast a "good" voluntary organisation to a "bad" one which is inherited or otherwise unchosen by the individual.

Listen, for instance, to Bennett describe one of the "successes" of modern civil society,

One of the quiet success stories of strong civil societies, particularly the United States, has been the manner in which the compulsory family and religious affiliations from the Old World were transformed in the New World into voluntary associations of civil society, and the immigrants themselves changed from members of traditional societies into self-actualized individuals.

This is one of those pure expressions of liberal belief. According to Bennett we become a "self-actualized" (self-created) individual only when we leave behind a traditional society with its "compulsory" (unchosen) affiliations in favour of purely voluntary forms of social organisation and identity.

Not surprisingly Bennett also praises the early settlers of America for their support of individual contract and covenant as a basis of social organisation. He writes,

In fact, Anglo-America was a particularly strong civil society from the start, especially in New England and Pennsylvania, where Puritans and Quakers, both of whom were strongly dedicated to the fundamentals of civil society, brought particularly robust institutions. Above all, they elevated the sanctity of contract and covenant to central places in their moral universe, a critical advantage in fostering civil society.

So Bennett takes very seriously the idea that social organisations are to be built around the voluntarily contracting individual. Hence his insistence on the following:

It is important to make clear that at the root of civil society is the individual. People who define themselves primarily as members of collective entities, be they families, religions, racial or ethnic groups, political movements, or corporations, cannot form the basis of a civil society.

In a true civil society, individuals must be free to dissociate themselves from such collectives without prejudice and reaffiliate with others. Societies that permanently bind individuals under the discipline of inherited or assigned collectives remain bogged down in ethnic, racial or religious factionalism ...

It is likewise important to make clear that a family in a civil society is a voluntary association.

Illegitimate

Perhaps the problem with Bennett's vision of civil society is now clearer. For Bennett even the family is only allowed to exist as a "voluntary association".

What's important for Bennett is that there are no necessary or natural allegiances binding us in particular ways to certain groups of people.

Yet we are bound in a natural way to our own families. Ties of kinship are strong, and ought to be encouraged to help preserve a stable family life.

Again, in Bennett's view there is a problem with ethnic allegiances, since these are inherited or "assigned" rather than purely voluntary (self-chosen).

Bennett, it is true, does not wish to forbid individuals from associating with an ethnic collective. But this is to be a private matter, a kind of personal choice or preference. The state is to only recognise the individual.

This effectively rules out the survival of an existing ethnic identity. It means that the state can't consider ethnicity in determining its immigration policy. And so you reach the point at which ethnic mixing occurs and the original strength of an existing ethnic identity begins to weaken.

Not that Bennett is too fussed by this. He believes that right-liberal societies can prosper and triumph by reducing impediments to foreign immigration, thereby attracting the best and brightest from around the world.

He claims, for instance, that America has powered ahead of Germany because America was more willing to recruit South Asian computer programmers and that Japan will miss out on the "next stages of the scientific-technological revolution" because its restrictions on foreign immigrants are too "rigid".

So Bennett can be described as nothing less than an immigration enthusiast.

A high cost

The cost of James Bennett's Anglosphere is very high. You get the promise of a technologically dynamic society. But you are only allowed to maintain voluntary associations.

This rules out a stable family life, at least for a great many people. It also rules out the survival of existing ethnic groups, including the Anglos themselves.

I don't want to be part of such an Anglosphere. I believe that our task is not to extend right-liberalism internationally, but to oppose it and drive it back within our own countries.

To do so, conservatives need to carefully distinguish our own view of civil society, in which human associations are allowed to grow naturally, "organically" and deeply, from the right-liberal one, in which only voluntary associations made by covenanting individuals are permitted.

(First published at Conservative Central, 09/04/2005)

Across the political spectrum

All of the major political parties are liberal but they aren't all the same.

They are all liberal because they all follow the liberal first principle: that to be fully human we must be self-created by our own individual will and reason.

The parties are different, though, in how they try to follow through with this principle. It's useful to try to understand how the different forms of liberalism are represented across the political spectrum.

Right versus left liberalism

The major distinction is that existing between the right and left wing of politics. This division (in its modern form) has been around since at least the late nineteenth century.

Right liberals are the heirs of the classical liberal tradition, which was dominant in the English speaking countries in the early and mid-nineteenth century.

The classical liberals tried to solve the basic problem of liberalism in an ingenious way. Liberals want us to be unimpeded in following our own will and reason. But if you have millions of individuals each doing whatever they want, then how do you hold a society together?

The answer for the classical liberals was not to deny that individuals would act selfishly under the liberal principle, but to argue that this selfishness would actually benefit society through the workings of a free market. In other words, millions of competing wills could successfully be regulated by a free market and bring about economic and social advancement.

This right liberal attitude has a number of consequences. Firstly, there is a great emphasis in right liberalism on Economic Man, as it is through our economic activities that we carry out the underlying principles of liberalism. In fact, it's important to remember with right liberals that the free market doesn't just exist for purely economic outcomes: it is the bearer, for right liberals, of larger liberal ideals. That's why a right liberal like Margaret Thatcher could proclaim that "Economics are the method; the object is to change the soul."

Also, right liberals don't like the state to interfere with the workings of the free market. They have therefore tended to prefer a smaller state than other kinds of liberals.

The commitment to the free market has also led right liberals to prefer an ideal of equal opportunities rather than equal outcomes. After all, if you support the free market then you have to accept that some will do better than others, and end up with greater wealth and power.

And historically this is where classical liberalism spawned an opposition. Some liberals could not commit themselves to the inequality of condition brought about by classical liberalism.

Therefore, instead of looking to the free market to regulate the millions of competing wills, they looked to the state instead. These were the "new" liberals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But today they are called left liberals or social democrats.

The contrast between right and left liberals could be broadly put as follows. Whereas right liberals focus on Economic Man, left liberals instead emphasise the idea of Social Man (which is why the left wing opponents of the World Economic Forum established a rival grouping called the World Social Forum).

Whereas right liberals are anti-statist in the sense that they don't like too much state interference in the economy (and so often have policies of privatisation and deregulation), left liberals tend to be statist and have at times called for the nationalisation of industry.

Whereas right liberals are most comfortable with equality of opportunity (a level playing field) left liberals are more sympathetic to government intervention to engineer equality of outcome.

And finally, there is one more common distinction between right and left liberals. Left liberals, even when they are an influential part of the establishment, like to see themselves as "dissenters". Right liberals, on the other hand, are more inclined to see themselves as "loyalists".

(Another marker of the distinction between right and left liberals is that right liberals often identify positively with the USA, where right liberalism is strongest, whereas left liberals look to the Scandinavian countries, where social democracy is most dominant.)

Left liberalism

The distinction that people make between the right wing and left wing of politics therefore holds true, as long as it's realised that this is a broad distinction between different kinds of liberalism.

It's possible to go further than this, though, and make distinctions between different kinds of left liberals and right liberals.

For instance, within the left liberal camp there are what might be termed "mainstream left liberals" or "social democrats". These are left liberals who are committed to gradual reform through democratic politics. They include the American Democrats, the British Labour Party and the Australian Labor Party.

They are different from radical left liberals who prefer to take direct action to achieve their aims immediately. Some feminists, socialists and animal liberationists fall into this radical left liberal camp.

Then there are libertarian left liberals, sometimes known as anarchists. Like other left liberals, they are hostile to the idea that a free market should regulate the workings of society. But instead of looking to the state as an alternative, they want things to be determined at a local community level.

To summarise, the left liberal camp can be further divided into three parts: mainstream left liberals (social democrats), radical left liberals (socialists) and libertarian left liberals (anarchists).

Right liberalism

It's also possible to make distinctions within the right liberal camp. First, there are mainstream right liberal parties, such as the American Republicans, or the British Conservatives, or the Australian Liberals. These parties are sometimes confusingly called "conservative" parties, even though they are based on a liberal philosophy.

The more radical version of right liberalism is right libertarianism. Right libertarians are more strongly opposed to the role of the state in society than mainstream right liberals. They are also more likely to see themselves as dissenters than mainstream right liberals.

Right and left libertarians obviously agree with each other in wanting to strictly limit the sphere of the central state. However, right libertarians support the free market as an alternative, putting them at odds with left libertarians.

The mainstream

An even finer level of distinction can be made within the mainstream left and right liberal parties.

For instance, in Australia the mainstream left liberal party, the Labor Party, has a left wing and a right wing. As you would expect, the more left wing members of the party are more firmly opposed to the free market and more strongly in favour of state intervention.

It is the right wing of the Labor Party which has been dominant, though, and which has been willing to agree to free market measures such as privatisation and deregulation.

Similarly, the mainstream right liberal party, the Liberal Party, has a left wing (the wets) and a right wing (the dries). In the past, the wets were often small businessmen who weren't so keen on a free market in which the larger and more powerful economic units could clear out the weaker. (Nor were they keen on small business being at the mercy of powerful unions which dominated the Labor Party.)

It's not surprising that the wets within the Liberal Party have defected in the past to form independent left wing parties (such as the Australian Democrats).

The spectrum

The political spectrum is therefore made up different varieties of liberalism. The main division is between left and right liberals. Right liberals look to the free market to regulate competing wills, left liberals believe instead that either the central state or local communities should perform this role.

There are further distinctions within each wing of politics with the "moderates" broadly in the middle and radicals at either end.

Of course, looked at more closely the situation is more complex than this. Still, a general understanding of the political spectrum is useful to get a grasp on the way that politics currently works.

(First published at Conservative Central, 19/06/2004)

What is conservatism?

Conservatives got their name because they wanted to conserve important aspects of their own tradition.

What conservatives wanted especially to defend were particular forms of human identity and connectedness. For conservatives, the need for these forms of identity and “relatedness” is an unchanging part of our human nature.

These forms of connectedness include:

- the connection existing between members of an ethnic group based on a shared ancestry, culture, religion, history and language

- our masculine identity as men or feminine identity as women

- our role as fathers and mothers or husbands and wives within a family and our place within a family tradition

- marital love and paternal & maternal love

- our sense of connectedness to nature and our attachment to a particular locality

- a positive sense of our moral nature and of the existence of an objective moral order

Historically, individuals did not create these things for themselves. Instead these forms of connectedness grew in a distinctive way within a particular tradition. This is one reason why conservatives have tended to be strongly traditionalist.

Liberalism

However, from the time of the Renaissance in the 1400s there arose a strong challenge to conservatism, which is best known today as liberalism. Liberalism was based on the idea that the individual should be radically autonomous, so that he could choose to do what he wanted according to his own will and reason, and be able to create himself in any direction without impediments.

Most liberals did not want to radically destroy their own traditions. Unfortunately, the logic of their own first principles (known as liberal individualism) meant that the traditional forms of human identity and connectedness were undermined.

This is because liberals can only accept those things that the individual has chosen for himself. Most forms of human relatedness though are not chosen by the individual. For example:

- We don’t choose our own traditional forms of national or ethnic identity. Instead, we are simply born into them. Therefore liberals have tended to either reject nationalism altogether in favour of internationalism or else they support forms of nationalism, based solely on citizenship, which the individual can choose, or else they support fluid and pluralistic forms of nationalism based on multiculturalism.

- We don’t choose whether we are male or female. Therefore, liberals insist that masculine and feminine behaviour is simply an oppressive and artificial social construct which can be overcome through social engineering. Liberals prefer gender sameness or “androgyny.”

- The actual form of traditional family life, involving a husband, wife and children, was also unchosen. Liberals want to claim that there are many models of family life, and they want very easy divorce laws so that the individual can choose at any time who they will live with. Similarly, liberals don’t want gender based family roles, such as distinctive roles for fathers and mothers, since gender itself is unchosen.

- The existence of a moral order, as expressed through a traditional moral code, also restricts choice for the individual. Therefore, liberals have advanced the idea of a "personal" morality that is chosen by the individual alone and applies only to the individual.

Further differences

There are some typical differences between the way that conservatives and liberals think about things. For instance:

Human nature. Conservatives believe that there exists an essential human nature. This human nature is flawed, having both higher and lower qualities. Our human nature gives a definite direction to our lives. It is a part of the aim of any society, and of every individual, to draw out what is best in our nature, and to repress the worst, a difficult process that might occur over a long period of time.

Liberals, in contrast, want the individual to be created through his own will and reason. They therefore prefer to view the individual as a “blank slate” without any inherent qualities to influence his behaviour or to encourage particular loyalties or forms of association.

A further consequence of this belief in the individual as a “blank slate” is that individuals can theoretically be perfected under the right social conditions. Therefore, liberals have often put great faith in the idea of a human progress to perfection, and in the idea of reforming social conditions as a solution to any social problem.

Progress. Liberals have often believed in the idea of linear progress, which means a constant advance of humanity toward a perfect individual and a perfect society. It is because of this belief that liberals have sometimes been called progressives.

This belief is rarely held so naively these days. However, it is still evident in the fear of liberals in “going back” (to the 1950s etc) and in their enthusiasm for social change, even when the effect of such change is poorly thought through.

Conservatives tend to view societies as rising and falling according to their inner strengths and weaknesses rather than inevitably advancing. Furthermore, conservatives have a more protective attitude to their own tradition, and want to keep it alive for future generations. Therefore, conservatives tend to be more cautious about social change, as they want to know the long term effects that such changes will have on the social fabric.

Equality. Liberals often raise the slogan of equality. By equality, they seem to mean treating people the same, or not discriminating against people.

Conservatives don’t believe in treating people the same for the simple reason that people are different, in their inner natures, in the quality of their beliefs and actions, in their capacities and in the relation in which they stand to each other (for instance, we will usually discriminate in favour of people to whom we are closely related, such as family members).

There is a levelling tendency within liberalism, which denies the distinctions between people and refuses to judge the worth of their actions.

Rationalism. Liberals want people to decide things according to their own individual reason. This has led many liberals to support the idea of rationalism: that we come to our beliefs and knowledge of the world through abstract reason, ie through the analytical intellect, alone.

This belief in rationalism makes it hard for liberals to accept inherited forms of knowledge, and even more importantly, it undermines the position of whatever in life is intangible, in other words, whatever is hard to measure intellectually. How, for instance, can you validate through abstract reason such qualities as love and beauty, or nobility and honour, or whimsy and fancy?

Liberty. Liberals believe that by removing impediments to individual behaviour they are creating ever greater levels of human freedom.

The conservative view is that humans are fundamentally social creatures. Therefore, if we pursue a purely individual freedom to choose anything, we will fail to maintain the social conditions in which we can choose those things that are most important to us.

Varieties of Liberalism

There are two different varieties of liberalism. Left liberals place their focus on social individualism. They resent restrictions on the social behaviour of the individual, and so have sought to deconstruct traditional family life, gender roles, moral codes and so on. They are strongly statist, believing in a high level of government intervention in both society and the economy.

The focus of right liberals is on economic individualism. They tend to see individuals as economic units, and oppose restrictions on the economic activity of the individual or on the operation of capital (such as the movement of labour, or restrictions on investment etc.) Right liberals have often preferred a more limited role for government.

There is also a distinction between radical and gradualist (or mainstream) forms of liberalism. Radicals want to rapidly push liberal individualism to its logical conclusions, and are sometimes willing to use violent means to achieve their aims, whereas gradualists tend to work peacefully within the system and only want to take liberals principles one step at a time.

How do these distinctions work out in practice? Left liberalism is strongest amongst government employees like public servants and teachers. It is also well represented in the mainstream media, in the churches, and at universities. Left liberals have considerable influence politically through parties like the Australian Labor Party, the British Labor Party and the American Democrats.

Radical left liberalism is represented by movements like the anarchists, the communists, and the radical wings of the feminist and animal rights movements. It draws much of its support from the intelligentsia.

Right liberalism is supported by big business and the commercial classes. It is much more poorly represented intellectually than left liberalism, but has considerable political influence through its ownership of the mass media and through political parties like the Australian Liberal Party, the British Conservative Party and the American Republicans.

There is a more radical form of right liberalism called libertarianism. This movement is stronger in the US than Australia. Libertarians are often uncompromising in opposing the role of government in society and in their admiration for individual economic enterprise.

The realities of electoral politics have somewhat blurred the distinctions between mainstream left and right political parties. To achieve the necessary support to win office, the Australian Labor Party has been willing to adopt some right liberal policies, such as economic deregulation, whereas the Liberal Party has been willing to accept higher levels of taxation to maintain government social programmes.

Conservatism in Modern Society

Conservatism is sometimes wrongly seen to be an establishment philosophy. In fact, the establishment in all Western societies has for a long time been dominated by liberalism.

It is true that right liberal parties, like the Australian Liberal Party, are sometimes described as being conservative. However, there is at best a conservative tinge to a particular section of these parties.

The right liberal parties are “conservative” only in the sense that they sometimes object to new liberal measures introduced by the left liberal parties. Once implemented, though, they are usually content to carry forward the new programmes. Similarly, they might be “conservative” in being more concerned to carefully manage the process of social change. They rarely object though to the fundamental direction of the change.

In short, there is little principled or substantive conservatism within the right liberal parties, and certainly nothing that can withstand the primary emphasis in these parties on economic liberalism.

If genuine conservatism has had any influence in recent times it is because conservative values are still held to some degree by the general public. Populist conservatism, though, will not succeed by itself. It’s important also to have people who can present conservatism in a clear and consistent way as an alternative to the current liberal orthodoxy.

(First published 2002)

Conservatism vs Liberalism

One of the great choices in life is between conservatism and liberalism. This choice is not just about politics, but about the way we see the world and the values we hold.

Unfortunately, we are rarely given the information we need to make this choice intelligently. It is especially rare to get the information from a conservative point of view.

This essay aims to fill the gap. Hopefully it will make clear for the reader the most basic features of both conservatism and liberalism, and the significance of the differences between them.


Chapter 1. What is Liberalism?

Liberalism is made of up several elements, including individualism, rationalism and linear progress.

Individualism

Sometimes the word individualism is used in the same sense as individuality: the rejection of conformism to create an individual style or personality. Individualism in this sense would be supported by both liberals and conservatives.

The term liberal individualism, though, means something quite distinct. It refers to the belief of liberals in a certain kind of individual autonomy. In short liberals believe that human freedom depends on individuals being subject only to their own reason and will, so that individuals are left free to create themselves in any direction.

This belief has been asserted strongly in Western societies ever since the Renaissance. For instance, the fifteenth century writer Pico della Mirandola once imagined God saying to man that,

You, constrained by no limits, in accordance with your own free will ... shall ordain for yourself the limits of your nature ... We have made you ... so that with freedom of choice, as though the maker and moulder of yourself, you may fashion yourself in whatever shape you shall prefer.

In order for individuals to be "self-created" in this fashion, liberals have to clear a path for the exclusive operation of individual reason and will. Usually this involves:-

(i) An assumption that the individual starts out as a blank slate, without anything inborn to limit or give a natural direction to individual behaviour.

and

(ii) A rejection of forms of identity and authority which can't be shaped by individual reason or will.

Conservatives are opposed to liberals on both of these points. Firstly, for conservatives it is simply untrue that individuals start out as a blank slate. Instead, conservatives believe that individuals are heavily influenced by an inborn human nature. This human nature is flawed, intricate and difficult to shift. Much of the effort of society is to draw out the finer qualities of this nature, whilst discouraging the worst.

Secondly, conservatives don't reject forms of identity and authority simply because they aren't chosen by individual reason or will. Conservatives have often found themselves attempting to "conserve" such forms of identity and authority because of their value to individuals or to society. Specific examples of this are given in the next chapter on conservative belief; in general, though, conservatives would argue that rather than creating human freedom, the liberal approach tends to undermine the social framework and erode important forms of human "connectedness".

Rationalism

As already mentioned, liberals only wish to accept what has been validated by individual reason. This forms the basis of liberal rationalism: the idea that we come to our beliefs and knowledge of the world through abstract reason, i.e. through the "analytical intellect" alone.

Conservatives are critical of certain aspects of liberal rationalism, especially when it is crudely applied.

This is because abstract reason is really only able to deal with a small part of human experience. It is unable to adequately recognise many of the finer, more subtle and more intangible qualities of life.

How can you, for instance, validate through abstract reason such qualities as love and beauty, or nobility and honour, or whimsy and fancy?

At its worst, liberal rationalism has applied rigid "machine principles" to human life. For instance, the French utopian reformer Charles Fourier once calculated that humans should live in phalanxes of exactly 1620 people. The British utilitarians believed that they could scientifically calculate morality according to a balance of outcomes. And the German Bauhaus architects went so far as to define a house as a "machine for living in".

Another conservative complaint against rationalism is that it sometimes leaves liberals curiously dependent on abstract ideology. There are times when liberals cannot simply accept the most natural and healthy of human behaviours (e.g. romance between men and women, boys playing with trucks etc. ). Instead, such behaviours have to be agonisingly justified in reference to an abstract ideology: they have to be declared "politically correct".

What alternative do conservatives offer to liberal rationalism? Firstly, conservatives don't have such an abstract starting point as liberals. Conservatives are unlikely to want to "wipe the slate clean" in order to build up knowledge on wholly abstract (and inevitably arbitrary) principles.

Instead, conservatives are likely to start out with what we are able to perceive about ourselves, society and the larger nature of things, and apply to this our critical intelligence, in order to arrive at a consistency and reasonableness of belief, as well as to draw the lessons of experience, i.e. the testing of our beliefs in practice over time.

Also, in contrast to liberal rationalists, who have often wanted to start from "year zero", conservatives are likely to consider (but not blindly accept) the guidance of tradition. This is because successful traditions are often built on the collective insight and experience of generations; it seems more sensible to conservatives to try to learn from such traditions, rather than to force each and every individual to learn from scratch.

Linear Progress

Liberals used to have a strong belief in linear progress: in the idea that the world was steadily advancing towards a higher level of civilisation. This idea was clearly expressed, for instance, by the English writer Matthew Arnold in the mid-nineteenth century, when he proclaimed his "faith in the progress of humanity toward perfection."

Liberals today are usually not so optimistic. Nonetheless, the idea of linear progress still exists more subtly in liberal beliefs about the "progressive" nature of social reforms and change, and fears of "stagnation" or "going back".

Conservatives have a different reading of history. For conservatives, history is more about the rise and fall of societies according to their inner strengths and weaknesses, rather than a constant progress. Nor would conservatives ever talk of human perfection, given the flaws embedded into human nature.

Given these different starting points, it isn't hard to see why liberals and conservatives have a different attitude to social change.

It's not that conservatives are against change; in fact, there is a great deal in modern societies that conservatives would like to reform.

However, conservatives believe that social change has to take account of human nature - in particular, that the social framework that is put in place must intelligently complement the real motivations and desires that are part of human nature. Liberal reforms, based as they often are on abstract ideas, often fail to do this and so misfire.

Furthermore, conservatives believe that real reform, i.e. the shifting from worse forms of human behaviour to better, is a difficult cultural achievement that takes place over generations. Such achievements, therefore, are not to be lightly discarded.

For this reason, conservatives are critical when liberals make reforms merely in a spirit of social experimentation, or when liberals want change just for the sake of change.

Conservatives and liberals have usually also wanted a different direction to change. Liberals, over several centuries, have sought to deconstruct the traditional social framework, in order to achieve a greater level of individualism; conservatives have attempted, in contrast, to conserve the more valued elements of this framework (hence of course the name conservative).

Over time liberals have succeeded in their aim; since the 1970s very little in Western societies has escaped the influence of liberal individualism.

This means that conservatives today are not the defenders of an established order, but instead are challengers of what has become a liberal orthodoxy.

Chapter 2. Conservative Belief

The differences between conservatism and liberalism should become clearer if we look at several key areas of conservative belief.

Nations

Throughout history there have existed groups of people united in a special way by kinship. Such peoples have shared a common ancestry, language, history, culture, religion and so on, which combine together to form a distinct ethnic identity.

Often such ethnic groups have existed at a tribal or regional level. However, it sometimes also happens that an ethnic group lives together in a large territory with its own political state. When this occurs, the people involved become something more than an ethnic group - they become a nation, with a distinct national identity.

For conservatives, membership of an ethnic group, and especially of a nation, is a positive feature of life. It is part of a real, historical collective identity existing between a group of people, which often becomes an inseparable part of our individual identity - of our sense of who we are.

Furthermore, a national or ethnic identity gives us a sense of connection to both past and future generations; it also encourages the idea that each individual has a respected place in society, in terms of having a role and responsibility within the collective effort; and finally, a national or ethnic tradition also strengthens the connection felt by individuals to their environment - it strengthens the attachment felt by individuals to the urban heritage or to the countryside of their native land.

Unlike conservatives, liberals have not given a very stable level of support to national or ethnic traditions. It's not hard to understand why this should be the case. As we saw in the first chapter, liberals support a philosophy of individualism, in which individuals start out as "blank slates", and are self-created through their own reason and will.

A national or ethnic identity, however, is not something we choose for ourselves through our reason or will, but is something we are born into. Liberals, therefore, have either tended to reject inherited national traditions altogether in favour of internationalism, or else have sought to redefine the idea of nationalism, so that it is based solely on citizenship.

When membership of a nation is based only on citizenship, then a national identity is something that can be chosen by the individual: the individual can seek to alter the definition of citizenship, or to choose to hold citizenship rights in whatever country they prefer.

Conservatives would argue, though, that in making membership of a nation malleable in this way, the inherited, and deeper, forms of national identity are lost, leaving the individual to a far greater degree "free-floating" or "rootless" - without the same strength of attachment to a particular national culture and tradition.

Finally, conservatives are also critical of those liberals who, curiously enough, are happy to support and enjoy foreign national or ethnic cultures, whilst denigrating their own.

In Australia, this denigration of the "home" culture has led to a distorted view of Australian history. There is a tendency to underplay the sacrifices and achievements of the early settlers, and to emphasise their faults. The historian John Hirst has criticised this trend towards "a history of Australia that characterises British Australia - Australia before the great postwar migration - as a long dark age." For conservatives, this "black armband" view of Australian history is of special concern, since conservatives wish to build on the best of a tradition, rather than to selectively emphasise the worst.

Gender

Conservatives support gender difference. They believe that men and women are different by nature, and that this is a positive aspect of life.

Conservatives support gender difference for several reasons. Firstly, for conservatives the feminine qualities of women and the masculine qualities of men have a value in themselves - they are something to be admired. Secondly, gender difference is the basis of heterosexuality; by definition, heterosexuality means the attraction of men to the feminine qualities of women and vice versa. Finally, gender difference is important in making men and women complementary to each other, so that together men and women provide the different qualities needed by individuals, families and communities.

The conservative attitude to gender is well-summarised, if a little overstated, by the nineteenth century writer John Ruskin, who wrote,

We are foolish, and without excuse foolish, in speaking of the "superiority" of one sex to another, as if they could be compared in similar things. Each has what the other has not; each completes the other, and is completed by the other; they are in nothing alike, and the happiness and perfection of both depends on each asking and receiving from the other what the other only can give.

Unlike conservatives, liberals have not proven to be reliable supporters of gender difference. Again, this can be traced back to liberal individualism. Liberal individualists want to be "self-created" - they don't want to be born into a particular gender with well-defined gender qualities.

When confronted with the reality that men and women do tend to act in certain typically masculine or feminine ways, liberals claim that this is merely a product of "socialisation": of the oppressive influence of traditional culture. Accordingly, liberals have attempted to "re-engineer" gender, with the purpose of creating more similar patterns of behaviour between men and women.

The results have been predictable. There has been some blurring of gender, as the normal process of encouraging the stronger masculine qualities of men, and the stronger feminine qualities of women, has been put into reverse.

However, the basic gender differences have inevitably remained, since these are "hard-wired" into us, as scientists have demonstrated ever more conclusively.

Again, for conservatives, this is not a cause of regret, since gender difference, while occasionally frustrating, is generally an appealing aspect of life.

Family

Many people in their teenage years react against the idea of family. It is often a time when people wish to be independent and free of of the personal frictions which go along with family life.

Nonetheless most people eventually choose to establish their own families. Why? Partly because the family, for all its imperfections, is usually the most stable source of support for individuals. It is also due to the strong instinct most people eventually feel to find a life partner and to have children.

Conservatives are supportive of family life. In particular, conservatives believe in the ideal of a stable family life, in which the different qualities of men and women are made complementary to each other.

Liberals take a different view of the family. Firstly, liberals find it more difficult to accept stable family commitments, since for liberals the idea of individual autonomy, of being independent and "free to choose" is paramount. Liberals, therefore, have acted to "loosen up" family commitments, by redefining the family so that it describes any arrangement of people living together, and by supporting easier divorce laws, culminating in the "no fault" divorce laws of the 1970s.

Secondly, liberals, being hostile to the idea of gender difference, have attempted to create a genderless family, in which men and women are expected to behave exactly the same.

This is one of those liberal "reforms" which was never thought through very clearly. It was heavily promoted in the 1970s when motherhood was unpopular amongst political women; this allowed the assumption to take hold that women could easily follow the same career pattern as men.

However, most women did eventually choose to have children, and were then left with the role of "supermums" - of trying to juggle motherhood responsibilities and traditionally masculine career demands at the same time. This was unrealistic, especially as most men proved less committed to taking over motherhood tasks, not least because their working hours were already steadily rising.

As a result, men and women have been left to muddle their way through the expectations of the genderless family as best they can. Conservatives believe that it would be better to scrap the emphasis on gender sameness within the family altogether, and try instead to achieve a balance between men and women in family life.

The Economy & Society

Historically there have been two basic kinds of liberalism.

The first kind, classical liberalism, had its heyday in the mid-nineteenth century. Classical liberals believed that the free market was self-regulating, so that governments should remain small and interfere as little as possible in the economy.

This kind of liberalism has made a comeback in recent years, under the name of "economic rationalism" or "neo-liberalism." Such liberals want to privatise and deregulate the economy.

The second kind of liberalism, "new liberalism", emerged in the late nineteenth century. New liberals wanted to make social reforms through intervention by a strong central government. Eventually, new liberalism was to lead to high levels of state ownership of the economy, and the building of the welfare state.

Conservatives are similar to classical liberals, and opposed to new liberals, in wanting a small central state. Why? When a large bureaucratic state takes over it tends to erode the institutions of civil society. People deal with a central state passively as separate individuals, rather than as mutually supporting members of a community.

Furthermore, too much power in the hands of the central state allows it, temporarily at least, to engage in social engineering - to overthrow the more natural forms of social organisation in favour of a ruling ideology.

There are some free market liberals who have a similar attitude to conservatives in this respect. Such liberals recognise that to have a small government you need to look after society by encouraging an ethos of personal responsibility and by having a well-functioning civil society.

However, unlike such classical liberals conservatives do believe in the need to regulate the market. Conservatives don't believe that the profit motive, if left to itself, necessarily creates the best outcomes for society. An example of this is that without sensible regulation a capitalist economy would quickly exploit and degrade the environment.

The Environment

Conservatives are strongly environmentalist. In part, this is because of the importance of heritage to conservatives, which means that conservatives wish to preserve the better historic areas of towns, as well as attractive areas of the countryside. Conservatives also believe that a natural environment has a positive influence on people, so that it is better for people to grow up and live in leafy surrounds, rather than in a concrete jungle.

Conservatives, however, would differ from some radical greens in recognising the need to use and develop natural resources. The point for conservatives is to attempt to do this intelligently and sustainably, with the least long-term damage to the environment.

Chapter 3. Politics in Australia

It is time now to look at the way in which conservatism and liberalism are actually represented in Australia. The starting point is to distinguish between two different kinds of liberalism: left liberalism (the modern version of "new liberalism") and right liberalism (the modern version of classical liberalism).

Left Liberalism

Left liberals believe in a relatively high level of government intervention in the economy and society.

They tend to support state ownership of sections of the economy, as well as high levels of government spending. Not surprisingly, many left liberals are white collar state employees, such as teachers and public servants.

Left liberals are (like all liberals) individualists, who believe in breaking down restrictions on the self-created, autonomous individual. They are more willing than right liberals to achieve change in this direction through government social engineering and collective social movements.

Left liberals have considerable influence in society. First of all, they are represented politically by the Labor Party, the Democrats and the Greens. They also dominate the education system, the arts and much of the media, particularly where social issues are concerned. (The Age in Melbourne for instance is almost exclusively left liberal on social issues.)

There is also a more radical version of left liberalism, found in sections of the socialist, feminist and gay movements. Such radical left liberals are often more ideological than other left liberals, more inclined to work outside the system through campaigns and demonstrations, and more likely to believe in using violent or authoritarian means to achieve their aims.

Right Liberalism

Right liberals have a much stronger focus on economic issues than left liberals. Their major concern is for economic activity to be unfettered by the state; they want, in other words, to remove impediments to the operation of the free market.

As might be expected, right liberals are often drawn from the business or commercial classes. Politically, right liberals are represented by the Liberal Party, the National Party (and by the Republican Party in America and the "Conservative" Party in Britain).

Right liberals have much less cultural influence than left liberals, though they do have considerable clout through their economic power and their ownership of the media.

On social issues, there are some differences between right liberals. Some right liberals are not so much social individualists as "economic individualists": they tend to see people in terms of being individual economic units, and they want an "open" society, not for the triumph of individual reason and will, but to have the least restriction on business choices and economic activity.

There are however more "conservative" right liberals, who still want to defend some parts of the social framework. As mentioned earlier, some right liberals recognise that if you want to reduce the role of central government, you need individuals to be supported by civil society and by an ethos of personal responsibility.

The existence of these "conservative" right liberals has often drawn conservatives toward parties like the Liberal Party. However, conservatives have usually ended up disappointed; such parties have never defended conservative values or institutions effectively as their underlying philosophy remains individualist, and as their belief in an unregulated free market often clashes with a defence of conservative values.

Conservatism

It should be clear from the above that the major political parties in Australia, as well as the media and education system, are dominated by different forms of liberalism. Conservatism, therefore, is not well represented in Australian politics.

Conservatism, though, is not entirely without influence. This is because the beliefs of the average person still remain closer to conservatism than to liberalism. Liberalism really only has a stronghold amongst the inner-city, middle class "chattering classes" (and some of the middle-suburban commercial classes). The rest of the population has been surprisingly resistant to liberal ideas, despite the heavy dose of liberalism they receive from the education system and the media.

It is possible to speak, therefore, of a division between a liberal "elite" and a "popular" conservatism. This popular conservatism, though, has not been well-enough organised, or clearly enough defined, to take a leading role in politics. Instead, its major influence has been more indirect: the commercial media, and the main political parties, do have to take some notice of it if they wish to succeed.

One example of this was the defeat of the Keating government in 1996. This is usually explained by the excessive attention Keating gave to "trendy" liberal policies, which alienated the more conservative blue collar vote.

Conclusion

Liberals may only be a minority of the population, but they have dominated Australian politics for many years now. They have been able to do so because they have been much better organised than conservatives.

The challenge for conservatives, therefore, is to begin to bridge the gap by becoming better organised. As part of this, conservatives need to argue their beliefs more clearly and to a wider audience.

This pamphlet has been a small step in that direction. Hopefully it has opened up for the reader the significance of the debate between conservatives and liberals. It is this debate, after all, which is the crucial dividing line of politics, and which will determine the future direction of Australian society.

(First published as a pamphlet 1997)

In defence of what matters

There is a logic within liberalism by which what really matters must be made not to matter.

The reason for this runs as follows. Liberal modernity has been formed from a number of factors; one of them is the idea that our distinction as humans is that we are "self-authored".

To achieve a fully human status, therefore, we must create who we are from our own individual reason and will. There are impediments, though, to our achieving this aim.

If we are defined or guided by tradition or by biology, for instance, we are being influenced in an important way by what we inherit, rather than what we create for ourselves. Therefore, a strict liberalism will logically reject such influences.

The problem is that it's unlikely that aspects of the self would have been hardwired into us as part of our given nature if they weren't important. Similarly, it's unlikely that at least some aspects of culture, belief and identity would have survived in the long term as a tradition if they weren't important.

Liberalism, therefore, faces the task of making certain aspects of reality which matter most not matter.

Liberalism, for instance, must make our sex, our being a man or woman, not matter. It must make our membership of an ethny not matter. It must make uncontracted forms of authority, such as the authority of fathers, not matter. It must make external, objective or traditional moral codes not matter. It must make a singular, traditional form of the family not matter.

How does liberalism attempt to do this? One drastic method liberals use is to frame political debate in terms of an asocial, blank slate individual. This individual is "abstracted" to the point that the things which matter don't even have to be acknowledged within political discussion.

Liberals might also cast the things which matter as being oppressive restrictions on the self, from which individuals must be liberated. Negative labels might be applied; for instance, a belief that our sex matters might be harshly labeled "sexist" and a belief that our ethny matters might be condemned as "racist".

Liberalism also makes inroads by limiting political contest to second tier disputes within liberalism itself. If you have a liberal view of society as being made up of millions of competing, atomised wills, each seeking to enact their own will, you then have to explain how such a society might hold together.

Over the years, liberals have proposed a number of solutions. Some have put their faith in the idea that humans are naturally good and are only corrupted by faults within their living conditions which might be remedied. Some, in contrast, have looked to a state imposed rule of law to uphold social order.

There have been those who have hoped that an enlightened elite might act to manage such a society. However, there are two other suggestions for regulating competing wills which have dominated politics for the past century.

The first is the "right liberal" (or classical liberal) idea that individuals can behave selfishly for their own profit, but that the hidden hand of the free market will regulate such activity so that society as a whole will progress.

The second is the "left liberal" (or social democratic) idea that society can be regulated by the state via neutral expertise.

When we think of the political contest between left and right it's really about this "second tier" liberal issue of how to regulate competing wills. Right liberals will talk about preserving individual liberty through the free market and a small state; left liberals will put things in terms of liberation movements and social welfare and reform.

If the political contest is kept at this second tier level then it becomes easier to exclude a consideration of the things that matter.

So what do we do? It would take too long to attempt a complete answer. So I'll focus on one thing: conservatives need to disentangle themselves from a right-liberal politics.

This means being careful not to reduce a conservative politics to a belief in the free market. If our focus is just on the free market, then we are allowing political debate to remain at the second tier level I described above, so that it's difficult to raise the more significant first tier debate we need to have.

There's another problem with focusing our politics on the free market. A conservative might well make the case for a free market on a pragmatic basis of what works best for society. Right-liberals, though, are attached to the free market for reasons of political principle. For them, it's the big solution to a much larger issue of making a liberal society function.

This leads to free market politics being more absolute and ideological than it ought to be. For instance, as right-liberals see our economic activity within a market as serving much larger ends, they tend to focus excessively on "economic man". Also, an ideological commitment to the free market can lead right-liberals to support the free movement of labour, as a principle, overriding more practical concerns about the real-life consequences of open borders.

The effort to disentangle conservatism from right-liberalism also means exercising care when adopting "individual liberty" as a slogan.

Liberalism has been dominant for some time now, so when liberty is spoken of it is commonly understood in terms of liberal politics. This can mean that liberty is thought of, in right-liberal terms, as the freedom of an abstracted individual against the state or against any kind of collective. It can mean too that "liberty" is understood in more general liberal terms as a freedom from what matters: as a "liberation" from significant aspects of our own selves which aren't self-authored.

A conservative politics can't be based on liberty understood in these terms. If we are to be free, it must be as complete, non-abstracted men living as social beings within given communities.

But even if liberty were better defined, it still wouldn't be for conservatives a sole, overriding, organising principle of society. It would be seen as one important good to be defended amongst other important goods.

Our ancestors, for instance, would have considered other qualities to also be significant, such as honour, honesty, loyalty, integrity, piety, courage and nobility.

One important step, therefore, in defending what matters is for conservatives to reach beyond a right-liberal politics. The politics of the free market and individual liberty, as defined within right-liberalism, isn't adequate for our purposes.

We need to stake out a politics of our own and not attempt to conduct business within a theoretical framework established by liberalism.

Making distinctions

Here's the Ozconservative outline of the political spectrum.

a) The spectrum is about differences in liberal politics. When we speak about the left-wing and the right-wing of the spectrum we're really talking about a difference between the liberal left and the liberal right.

There's a reason for this. All forms of liberalism have to answer a very significant question. If you have an individualistic picture of society, in which millions of individuals each act unimpeded to follow their own will and reason, then you have to explain how a society will hold together.

The answer given by right-wing liberals is that individuals can act selfishly, but to the benefit of society, if the hidden hand of the market is allowed to regulate their activity.

Left-liberals, in contrast, look less to the free market, and more to the state to regulate society and to "harmonise wills".

b) Therefore a spectrum will go roughly as follows:

anarchists - Marxists - social democrats - mainstream right liberals - libertarians

If you start in the middle, you have the distinction between left-liberal social democrats (like the Australian Labor Party) and the mainstream right-liberal parties (like the Australian Liberal Party).

The distinction is clearest if you compare the left-wing of the Labor Party to the Liberal Party. The Liberal Party is very clearly more in favour of privatisation and deregulation than the Labor left.

If we go leftward, we find more "radical" versions of left-liberalism. They're more radical in the sense of being more violent in the means they're willing to use, not that they are necessarily more statist. The Marxists want to smash capitalism and establish a coercive workers' state (but this state is then supposed to wither away). The anarchists believe in direct action, but want to replace capitalism not so much with a central state as with local forms of organisation.

If we go back to the middle and turn rightward, we find a more "radical" form of right-liberalism in libertarianism. It's more radical not because it's more violent, but because libertarians want to more strictly limit the role of the state in regulating society in favour of a freer market system.

The spectrum is no doubt crude in the way it describes politics, but it does seem to broadly work.

The point for traditionalist conservatives is not to find a place within this spectrum but to open up a political position outside of it.